All great marketing solutions start with a well and accurately defined problem and a correct diagnosis of the course of action that needs to be…
Nice emergency service, shame about the brand extrension. Image courtesy of Ruth Flickr. The Peter Principle maintains that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to…
Bureaucracy by Dan_DC. A few years ago I wrote a post about Douglas Holt and his then new book ‘how brands become icons’. The post…
Image courtesy of NuriaGuttierrez. There are a group of brands that face a specific set of issues and that require specific actions to help them.…
Image courtesy of StephanieNguyen I’m a bit of a latecomer to the Toms party but then I’m not an environmental activist and I don’t live…
Image courtesy of Dave van Hulsteyn This is the summer of the comeback. Blur are back, Oasis are back, Abba have been approached to take…
It is not clear why, of all the things that might concern a business as we enter a year of economic and consumer uncertainty, changing…
Ferret racing in the rain at this year’s Innocent Village Fete in London. Image courtesy of fimb
How many companies can get thousands and thousands of people to pay £7.50 to immerse themselves in the brand’s experience for a day even when it pours with rain. This brand goes from genius to utter genius.
The definition of irony. A British Red Cross ambulance paid for by the workers of the Bristol cigarette manufacturers WD & HO Wills 1914-18. Image courtesy of brizzle born and bred.
As a life long non-smoker and rabid anti-smoker, no one has appreciated and enjoyed the progressive decline in smokers’ freedoms than me.
Image courtesy of Hans van Reenen
A while ago I introduced the idea of brand ecosystems. These are a group of mutually reinforcing brands, usually from different sectors that co-exist and often co-operate with a high likelihood that a customer of one part of the ecosystem will become a customer of the rest of its members.
Well I have been thinking about this a little more recently.
I did a panel session a few weeks ago with Russell at Promax, the annual conference and awards for the TV promotional people in the UK.
We were on the same bill (well they were on the main stage and we were in the studio) as some real giants of the media world – Will Gompertz (who heads up Tate Media), Emily Bell (the genius behind the Guardian’s mastery of the world of online journalism) and the legendary Stephen Berlin Johnson (he of ‘The Ghost Map’ and ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ fame).
I was scared of messing up so I made some notes about the subjects we were due to cover and I thought I’d post them. They are a bit scrappy but if you are interested you will get the general drift.
